Library without books

When I told a friend I was planning on visiting the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, he offered a warning. “There are no books. They really should call it the ‘Billy Graham Experience.’”

The library is an experience indeed—both tackier and more interesting than I had imagined. The schmaltz has been well documented in critical reviews, which have duly noted, for example, the mechanized talking cow that greets visitors with stories of how cold young Billy’s hands were before sunrise on the dairy farm near Charlotte where he grew up. (Rather oddly, the narrative is accompanied by an apparently black woman’s voice singing about how God “owns the cattle on a thousand hills.”)